[mikets]

I am relatively new to Robotics and this forum. This is my first year to be involved in both FTC and FRC. I can appreciate the argument about not being able to develop and debug code without the expensive cRIO setup. But since I was also involved in FTC that uses the Lego Mindstorms, I was trying to develop an abstraction layer so that both FTC and FRC code can be based on the same library. This means that I can experiment and debug different algorithms without caring too much about whether it is cRIO or Mindstorms. I am starting to develop a library to achieve that goal. I am very far from the goal because of the differences between the platforms plus the fact that FTC doesn't support C++. Nevertheless, algorithm is algorithm and should be independent of programming language anyway. So I am planning to use the Mindstorm to develop the library and port it as best as I could to the cRIO. I am heavily using macros to hide the platform differences. I am not quite there in terms of source compatibility but that is my goal eventually.
It would make it easier if Windriver/WPILib also supports Mindstorms. This would greatly reduce cost in learning and experimenting with code. One can easily build a lego prototype to try something, migrate it to the FTC setup and eventually to the cRIO.